@Horo: Thanks. I agree with your assessment of the water, it would do what I wanted so I left it where you see it and played with elevation. After I saw the rendered image I saw why that water wouldn't do what I wanted. Still, ain't to shabby for an accident. I'm sure glad you didn't dump that image, it's wonderful. I didn't notice the guy waving until I read about it in your post. He's a nice touch.

@Sandy: That is some rock in that picture. And your try for an image of it looks pretty good.

@Horo: Thanks. I agree with your assessment of the water, it would do what I wanted so I left it where you see it and played with elevation. After I saw the rendered image I saw why that water wouldn't do what I wanted. Still, ain't to shabby for an accident. I'm sure glad you didn't dump that image, it's wonderful. I didn't notice the guy waving until I read about it in your post. He's a nice touch.

@Sandy: That is some rock in that picture. And your try for an image of it looks pretty good.

@Rareth: Neat results in that image. Are the pieces closer to the camera that large because they are close?

@Dave: Way good looking image. Love the material used on the cliffs(?).

@Tim Bateman: I sure wish my WIPs looked that good in the WIP stage. Beautiful work.

I didn't use dissimilar enough textures, a good part of that rubble pile is the sphere that hit the box, I'm still learning my way around Houdini, I can tweak the simulation so the sphere doesn't break up so completely.. but until then, I've retextured the rubble pile to clearly define what is Box pieces and what is left from the sphere.

I am searching for a modeler that fits my particular why of doing things, (and one I can afford) I like wings3d but it does have limits, tried modo, but was not really thrilled with it, same with Lightwave. The couple of tutorials I have done with Houdini seem to have clicked, and since I can export into Bryce (and possibly full scenes into DAZ) I might be able to make it work with the free version.

@Rareth: I did go and look up Houdini and about drop my drawers at the price. Someone is mighty proud of that software. Have you tried Hexagon? It takes a while to learn but it can produce some nice objects. And your latest experiment is real nice.

I find when using a lot of displacement Bryce uses more memory and CPU cycles. It could be that the CPU is overheating or you are running out of memory even if you are only using a little bit of displacement, it will depend on your system.

I usually try to remember to do a memory scrub before a big render or if Bryce crashes. I am also using LMA which starts up with windows, if you don't have it in the Startup folder it has to be started manually.

I have also noticed that when you get the 'Bryce has crashed' pop up you don't always have to close Bryce. Before clicking on the buttons at the bottom of the pop up click on the Bryce window to bring it forward and try saving your scene. Sometimes it works and sometimes not.

I have also noticed that Bryce will say it isn't responding but if left long enough it comes back. Again not always but it is worth waiting to see if you are in the middle of something. This is a System thing rather than Bryce as the system doesn't have enough resources to display the Bryce window even although Bryce is working away in the background. I find the editors take a long while to display too if there is displacement used in a scene and tend to leave that until last or turn it off once I have it set and take a note of the setting and turn it back on for the final render.

Image 1 is a new try at getting the shape. I put the picture into PS4 and changed it to a 16 bit greyscale then cut the rock out and saved it as a TIFF with a transparent background, which the terrain editor showed as black :)

I worked on it again until I got the shape shown. It must have something to do with the picture being flat and the perspective not transferring to the terrain editor properly.

I also tried adding displacement because of the previous posts. I took it up to 40 and then to 25, priority set to high, and rendered it a few times and never had a crash so I don't know why some are getting it.

Image 2 I changed the material and added a sun and changed the water. Theses are pre-renders. I am waiting on the full render of the second image to finish :)

Edited: Sandy - you are almost there, I just had a look at the picture you posted, did you try the lattice?

It was the Lattices I started off with and tried to 'sculpt' it. That didn't work too well :-) I also tried making it in two pieces. The 'Bow' part and then the 'Fiddle' and putting them together but that didn't work either. Using the picture and working with the tools in the Terrain Editor gives the better shape but loses the perspective but judicious use of the camera angle compensates a bit for that :)

Revisited this scene I set up a couple of years ago.
At the time I was doing some packaging for a product related to shower installations but I couldn't get the water to look right, using what I've learned over the past couple of years It's not looking too bad now and I've also managed to knock the render time down from just over 7 hours, to just over 3.

I know what you mean about the texture and I prefer the first one too.

This is a final render, took about two hours, with bump and displacement. I was also doing some renders in DAZ Studio too using the Yosemite Sky Domes and one of my figures, a highlander :) in the background and surfing the web and viewing videos on YouTube. I still didn't get any crashes and both the CPU and memory, 6Gb, was maxed out most of the time.